For B2B companies in particular, whose products or services are relevant only to a narrow target market, social media marketing is an effective way of demonstrating relevance and thus value.
For social media-savvy B2B businesses, awareness-generating and top-of-mind strategies enable them to always appear front and centre with their customer base, achievable both organically and through paid social media strategies.
Identify Your Audience
Too many B2B businesses treat social media like updating a Facebook status, posting random messages on Twitter and blogs – that’s just a tactic – a social strategy must include, as a minimum, defining what and when to post as well as who you are trying to reach. In short, it is about understanding what works for the people you are trying to reach. In order to gain maximum return on your social-media investment, you need your finger on their pulse. To produce punchy, resonant content and clever marketing, you need to narrow your social media . Don’t be afraid to craft a social tribe, or to address a particular group in your content or in advertising. So that you produce posts people respond to rather than posts people look at. One they care about. The other, they might glance at yet not take any notice of. You can start with your ‘known knowns’, which is your current audience. Have a think about which of your fans like, share and comment on your content; what do they have in common? Or you can look at your competitor’s audience, even finding new trends there.
Engage With Your Audience
Although B2B companies might have a narrower audience to engage, you still find creative examples of how they can leverage social media. One of the ways they can do this is to set up a new LinkedIn group targeted specifically at that group of people, so that they can be found more easily and also can showcase their knowledge the group. By engaging your audience through content calendaring, you make the consumers care about the movement in which your brand is involved. For instance, consider publishing content around a given theme before an event. That way, you can plan ahead what posts to share, ensuring timeliness and relevance leading up to a big event while still maintaining consistency for expected brand content.
Optimize Your Content
B2B companies have to provide meaningful information in an interesting format (infographics, videos), such as how one of your clients have used your product or service to solve their problem. You cannot shallowly seek to pique the hunger for consumer audiences with shock-and-awe visuals or catchy ads alone. They need to offer something with more substance to win this audience over. For example, you can use infographics or videos to share information in an interesting format by showcasing data, and share case studies about how one of your client has used your product to solve an issue they are facing. B2B firms that want to cultivate thought leadership can use hashtags, and launch employee advocacy programmes to highlight employees’ achievements on platforms like Facebook and Instagram. This not only drives brand loyalty, but cements the business as an industry leader. The constantly evolving nature of Twitter, which allows a company to comment on world events or exploit market changes almost in real time with appealing content targeted at B2B buyers, offers businesses the perfect platform to reach active consumers online.
Leverage Paid Advertising
And contrary to what many think, just because you are doing B2B marketing this doesn’t mean that you cannot derive substantial results from paid media on the social web. Unlike organic traffic channels where content is organically spread in social graphs and other user-driven networks, paid ads are designed to drive traffic directly to a company’s own website. When composed with appropriate creatives, these ads hold the potential of becoming powerful tools for audience engagement and conversion. When marketers know their ICPs, buyer personas and when their paid social strategy is informed by broader marketing goals, advertisements that suit their target audience easily follow. B2B businesses’ immediate goal should be establishing in-house content distribution, a catalogue that can be promoted through paid channels, keeping communities engaged along the way – not to mention yielding all the raw data they need to make sound decisions.
Create a Community
For example, B2B brands and businesses can build relationships and copy their audiences solving each other’s problems together, from ‘how do I speak to my boss about this proposal?’ It’s not just marketing buzz words: B2B organisations benefit by providing a place for their audience to come together – both the remote working executives and the account managers in the office everyday – to connect about the same challenges they’re facing and addressing their needs. This satisfies the users’ desire to seek out support since it might be hard to find offline, and makes these businesses appear much more human and friendly to their target market. To sustain high engagement and keep communities active, it’s crucial to think about creating engaging content that really hits the spot as audiences’ interests change. It’s about generating user-generated content, hosting Q&A sessions or enabling natural interaction with the brand directly. While the macro-level plan components of community-building remain consistent regardless of the platform, each is also a unique environment with nuanced sets of human dynamics, and these distinctions need to be taken into account when developing a community growth or retention strategy. Being able to maximise these differences is key to developing effective community growth and retention strategies.